AUTUMN SPEARS
About
Artist Statement
My work explores the concept of inheritance—both in relation to African American identity and within my own family history. I am interested in what it means to be a descendant of enslaved Africans while living within systems and narratives that have historically defined, fragmented, and reshaped that lineage.
Through this lens, I consider how identity is formed across generations: how it is inherited, disrupted, remembered, and reimagined. I am particularly drawn to the ways African American culture has developed its own origin stories and systems of meaning in response to historical rupture.
These questions inform my use of materials, imagery, and pattern. Working across mixed media, I build layered visual compositions that reflect the complexity of inheritance—drawing from domestic spaces, ritual, memory, and symbolic objects that speak to both personal and collective histories.
Biography
Autumn Spears is a Washington, DC–based multidisciplinary artist and art educator whose work explores inheritance and the formation of identity within the African American experience. Drawing from personal archives, domestic objects, and diasporic histories, Spears creates works that consider how culture is carried, fragmented, and remade over time. Through material, pattern, and repetition, her work examines lineage not only as ancestry, but as a lived and evolving condition.
Spears received her BFA in Art Education from Albright College in 2020. In 2023, she presented Becoming, her first solo exhibition, at the Freedman Gallery. Her work has been exhibited throughout Washington, DC, including the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, the Umbrella Art Fair, and the Anacostia Arts Center. Her work is included in the DC Art Bank Collection. She is also a recipient of a 2025 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship.